If you had to pick the one game that perfectly represented the wheels coming off a sure thing, you could do a lot worse than Dragon Age II.

Video game studios develop reputations that often overwhelm the reality of their products. BioWare is The Story-Based RPG studio. They’re not the only one, of course — you’ve got your Bethesdas, Obsidians, etc. — but there’s a certain set of expectations from BioWare games. They’ll be lengthy. They’ll often feature as much talking as they do combat. You, as the player, will have many choices to make, all with an ostensible effect on the game world as a whole. At one point, your character will be able to receive or initiate a declaration of undying love to one of various NPCs, followed by an awkward sex scene which means you have to be very careful playing a BioWare game in a shared living space. At the end of the game, you will have probably saved the kingdom, world, or galaxy, depending on the scope of this particular adventure. You will sit back as your virtual friends celebrate, and it will have been a Good Game.

Dragon Age II is not a good game.

It superficially resembles a good game in that it has every one of the above elements, but they don’t quite add up as they did in Dragon Age: Origins or Mass Effect. For every good idea they had (companions having lives outside what the player character did), they countered it with incredibly baffling design decisions. I am playing Dragon Age II as I type this sentence, engaging in a battle which requires me to do nothing but press the “A” button, over and over again. It kind of breaks the engagement, is what I’m saying, and brings to mind unflattering comparisons to something else you can do one-handed while typing.

Dragon Age II told you that you would make decisions that would change the fate of the world, but looking at the plot in retrospect leads one to the conclusion that everything that happened would have happened anyway if the player character was removed from the story. Even the final, climactic decision of which side to support in a magical civil war doesn’t matter — if you support one side, you have to kill your side’s leader (who has given into dark magic) and the other side’s leader (who has gone insane). Supporting the opposite side leads to the exact same series of fights in the exact same order with the exact same outcome. You might say that BioWare’s problem with endings started well before Mass Effect 3.

What Dragon Age II really does wrong, however, isn’t so much a product of its ending. It’s present right from the start of the game.

A good beginning is important to any piece of media (otherwise people will just move on to whatever the next bit is), but it’s absolutely crucial to story-based role-playing games. Much of the motivation in playing a video game is kinetic in nature — you’re promised more or better. Gears of War lures you onward with the carrot of more things to murder and more creative ways in which to murder them. Diablo (also an RPG, but with a greater emphasis on things like loot and leveling up than character interaction) lets you watch your experience points pile up like sand, while your character is clad in beefier and gaudier bits of equipment. Story-based RPGs need to do more to convince the player, because (at least in a BioWare game), everything you do is run through with consequence. Because you can choose your character’s decisions, you have to be made to care about the world and characters you’re affecting. This is a bit tricky, as there’s no real right way to do it, but there’s definitely a wrong way. Dragon Age II chose the wrong way.

Here’s how Dragon Age II begins:

That’s not the full beginning, but it would take an awful lot of your time to watch the whole thing. I’ll sum it up: you’re privy to the beginning of an interrogation. The man being questioned relates a fake story of Hawke, your main character. You take control of Hawke for a brief and bloody battle in which you rip through your enemies easily. The interrogator calls bullshit on the story, and the man being questioned starts to tell the real one: Hawke and his/her family are on the run, fighting the same battle but in a more desperate and realistic way. Hawke’s brother or sister (depending on which class you choose) are killed by a marauding beast, but the remaining characters are saved, to be spirited off to Kirkwall, the city in which the majority of Dragon Age II takes place.

As a beginning to a piece of media, it’s coherent. Everything that happens makes sense — even the early reveal of the narrator as unreliable. For a story-based RPG, however, it’s thin and inadequate, roughly comparable to meeting your spouse on the day of your wedding. In no particular order:

Who are these people? You’re part of a family on the run, but the first time you see them, they’re in a stressful and dangerous situation. Their characteristics are vaguely sketched — you get an impression that your younger brother is kind of a hothead, but that’s about the end of it.

Where are they from? There is constant talk about where the family is from — a small town which you passed through in Dragon Age: Origins — but you never actually see any of that yourself. You’re told about it often, but there isn’t chance to form an attachment to the place before it’s stolen away from you. The characters clearly miss it, but as you’ve just been introduced to them…

Why should I care about any of this?

Let’s take an example from one of the six possible beginnings (depending on your class) to Dragon Age: Origins. BioWare made that game too, so it’s not as if this is some trade secret to which they were never privy. If you play as a human noble character, you spend the first half-hour or so wandering around your family’s castle, talking to characters and doing minor quests (clearing giant rats out of the pantry, for example). Some of your family friends are visiting, and they’ve brought with them an attractive handmaiden named Iona. If you talk to her, and you’re playing a particularly charming or lecherous character, you can invite her to your room after everyone goes to bed. Thankfully, there is not an awkwardly-animated scene for this (you still don’t want to play it with other people in the room), but the result is that Iona is killed when she opens your door to investigate a disturbance — your family has been betrayed from within, and she’s the first casualty.

Roughly, here was my reaction to Iona dying in Dragon Age: Origins:

By comparison, here was my reaction to my character’s sibling dying in Dragon Age II

Both characters died horrible, unfair deaths, and yet the one that got to me was the one that my character had just met. I was all ready to go to town on the bastards who killed Iona, but when the ogre smooshed my character’s sibling into paste, my reaction was “oh, now I have to go kill that ogre so I can start the plot, or whatever”. Dragon Age: Origins has six separate introductions for your character, each allowing you to care about what you’re supposed to be doing before you get into the hack-and-slash. Dragon Age II only had one, which would lead you to expect that they would put a lot of care into it. They didn’t — whether due to a company-wide brain freeze, a lack of development time, or something else — and it really shows. You could have probably figured out that Dragon Age II was going to be a mediocre game based on its first twenty minutes. It was a half-formed game with half-formed ideas, just like its introduction.

Between this and the ending to Mass Effect 3, BioWare’s reputation has been in something of a freefall. There are some signs that they’re returning to form, however — the recently-announced Dragon Age III: Inquisition was accompanied by promises of lessons learned. How well they incorporate these lessons remains to be seen, but honestly, you won’t have to play the entire game to figure out how well they did. You’ll know in the first ten minutes.

Like this:

I found my old copy of Homeworld, Relic Entertainment’s 1999 space simulator and a dark horse candidate for Greatest Game Ever Made. Somehow, the CD still works on my computer, so I’ve been playing it off and on over the past few weeks. For a game that’s over a decade old, it still looks pretty damned good, and the actual gameplay holds up well. I love rediscovering old games — you get to approach them from a more mature perspective, which means you’ll notice themes and motifs you may have missed as a callow, acne-ridden nerd.

Not that I was ever that, mind you. I was a geek. Big difference.

Homeworld starts you off as the commander of your race’s first attempt at faster-than-light travel. Your home planet, called Kharak, is slowly dying — it’s mostly desert and there’s not much around in terms of resources — but fortunately for you, some explorers discovered the remains of an ancient starship buried beneath the desert. The starship had faster-than-light technology, and a map showing you the location of your actual homeworld, on the other side of the galaxy. Your people gathered up their remaining resources and built a big ol’ mothership, with the intent of traveling across the cosmos and discovering your mysterious origins.

The first mission is standard real-time strategy introductory fare; you learn to control your units, make your way around the map, and so on. It has this optimistic, giddy feel to it — like the Apollo program writ large. As your mothership detaches from its gargantuan scaffold for the first time, there’s a real sense of accomplishment, which is odd considering this happens before you have any input at all. Kharak is in the background of this scene, and despite the fact that it’s obviously a harsh planet, it serves as an anchor for the player. You’ve just been introduced to this planet, but you know what it represents: home.

Your hyperspace test goes well, and you jump out to a ship about a light-year away that you had sent on a long-range precursor mission. The scenery is largely the same (you can see the same constellations and nebulae in the sky as in the previous mission) save for one key difference — you can see your home star as a faint, slightly brighter-than-normal speck in the distance. Homeworld’s skyboxes are quite beautiful, but their particular genius is in how they give a certain structure to the emptiness of space. One series of missions has you winding your way farther and farther into a mysterious nebula, the center of which looms larger and larger in your viewscreen until you’re entirely enveloped in it. Another places the Mothership in the middle of a gargantuan, half-completed Dyson sphere, the scale of which produced the most intense feeling of insignificance I’ve ever felt while playing a game. It’s a very simple thing, but more than anything else, it’s responsible for Homeworld’s unique feel.

The second mission ends with the discovery that you’re not only not alone in the galaxy, but that you’re not particularly welcome. Your advance ship has been destroyed by alien raiders, and you head back to Kharak to regroup and plan your next move.

When you exit hyperspace at the start of the third mission, you’re confronted by this:

No lie: when I first saw this scene as a teenager, I teared up a bit. I’d blame misplaced hormones, but even now, when I’m older and know it’s coming, it’s incredibly affecting.

All the moving parts of this scene work together so well. The music, an adapted “Adagio for Strings”, is nothing if not the collected sense of loss and longing in audio form. Your two main characters — Fleet Command and Fleet Intelligence, who up until this point have formed a kind of nurturing mother/stern father duo — are nearly overcome by despair, even as they issue orders and assess the situation. As you scroll the screen around trying to make sense of the situation, you’re confronted with a nightmare version of the opening, optimistic skybox — Kharak is still in the background, but now it’s being eaten alive by fire. You’ve barely started the game, and already it’s punched you right in the gut and let you know just how alone you are.

There’s an additional aspect to this mission, one of those sublime and rare little moments where the developers managed to show what games are really capable of as an art form. Before you can even properly mourn Kharak, Fleet Intelligence draws your attention to a small group of ships still in-system. These ships are the rearguard of the fleet that destroyed Kharak, and they’re in the process of attacking six gigantic trays, each of which contain 100,000 of your fellows in cryogenic stasis. They were designed to sleep through your Mothership’s initial journey to your homeworld, but right now, as Fleet Command urgently notes, they’re all that’s left of your entire species.

Now, you have to do two things here: capture one of the four attacking ships in order to interrogate its crew, and save at least one of the six cryo trays, so your species can rebuild. The number of trays you save, in gameplay terms, is irrelevant; to the best of my knowledge, you don’t get any additional resources or bonuses if you go six-for-six. From my own experience, and in talking about this game around the internet, there seems to be only one approach to this mission: save every single cryo-tray. Even to this day, losing just one of them on that mission will cause me to curse and restart. Any other outcome feels like a failure.

Had Relic not done a masterful job of setting this moment up through the past few missions, it wouldn’t have held nearly the emotional weight that it does. It’s really a masterful stroke — all your affection for Kharak is immediately transferred onto these six featureless hunks of metal, under fire from those who would genocide your whole race. In a movie, you’d be rooting for the Mothership to come to the rescue, but in a game, it’s only up to you. In what other medium could you worry about letting down what you see on the screen?